ALSO BY EMILY CARPENTER
Burying the Honeysuckle Girls
The Weight of Lies
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Emily Carpenter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503951907
ISBN-10: 1503951901
Cover design by Rex Bonomelli
For Rick,
who is better than anything a Brontë could’ve dreamed up
CONTENTS
Start Reading
Friday, October 19 Afternoon
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Friday, October 19 Evening
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Friday, October 19 Evening
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Friday, October 19 Evening
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Friday, October 19 Evening
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Friday, October 19 Night
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Friday, October 19 Night
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Friday, October 19 Night
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Friday, October 19 Night
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Friday, October 19 Night
Chapter Thirty
Friday, October 19 Night
Eight Months Later
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The curate might set as many chapters as he pleased for Catherine to get by heart, and Joseph might thrash Heathcliff till his arm ached; they forgot everything the minute they were together again . . .
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Friday, October 19
Afternoon
There are monsters all around us—people who have to hide because the world can’t bear to see them for who they truly are. They’re good at keeping secrets, the monsters. Sometimes, too good.
Which is why I’ve always suspected that I am one of them.
A girl I once knew used to call me names: Egg Salad, Pizza Face, Fat Fuck. She claimed a family of cannibals wanted to adopt me and put me in their cellar, and that when they did, I would forget my name and who my mother was and become one of them. It was a cruel thing to say, but I saw the blackness of my own soul pretty clearly for a kid, so part of me believed her.
The strange thing was, when it came to predicting the future, she wasn’t that far off. Now I wonder if she hadn’t been, in fact, warning me.
Perched high on a lichen-crusted rock ledge, I look past the scuffed tips of my hiking boots at the waving branches of red and orange and russet below. I clutch an iPad to my chest, and the cold wind whips my hair, making my eyes water behind my glasses. The dampness is so thick it has a weight to it, even though it isn’t actually raining. It pierces through the too-big canvas coat I’m wearing, right through to my bones.
This day is nothing like the crisp blue night the name-calling girl—Chantal—died. That night was brilliant. The perfect night to lie under a canopy of stars.
I brush the thought away. It’s true I’m a bit of an oddball, and not just because of Chantal. I am what people call guarded. I don’t blog. I don’t post. I don’t share. I don’t love people in that beaming, open-armed way you’re supposed to, but there is a good reason for it. Dark things vein through me, the way precious metal shoots through the heart of a mountain. Dark things that should stay hidden, embedded deep within the rock. It is for the greater good that I stand guard over my mountain, over my past.
This particular mountain is only the dog tail of the Blue Ridge range, but standing here with the gorge dropping away beneath me makes it feel like the highest, loneliest point on earth. I’ve been staying in the crook of this mountain nearly a week, and I don’t even know the name of it. I do know, from my stellar Georgia education, circa fourth grade, that white men discovered gold in this area a century ago and took this mountain and all the rest of the northeastern part of the state from the Cherokee.
They ripped the gold out of the mountain, and after that came death and disaster.
I know another thing about this mountain, having seen it from the trail below. The cliff I’m standing on curves back under itself, creating a jutting shelf. I wouldn’t even have to jump out to fall. I could just take one small step, and it would all be over. I might crash straight down through branches and needles before I hit something solid, but eventually I would hit.
And it would hurt. Just like it must’ve hurt Chantal.
The cliff, the whipping wind, the thoughts of death—the whole scenario is so over-the-top gothic, it almost makes me laugh. But it is poetic justice. Full-circle closure. I am a runner, always have been, in different ways. And now, after all the years of running—in my head and heart and even physically, every dawn at the track down the street from my house—I’m finally being forced to stop. To decide what I really want.
Do I stay? Or do I throw myself off the cliff and end it, once and for all?
To my left, down the trail but still out of sight, I hear the rustle of leaves and breaking twigs. Someone is struggling up the path. Someone I know. My time is up. I have to decide. Quickly, before I go back down the trail to that house and everything gets confused again. Before I lose my way.
Suddenly, another sound. The cry of a bird, in the blue above me. A hawk is tracing figure eights. He’s relaxed, scanning the trees for dinner. Not a care in the world. No idea of the drama unfolding below him. And then, beside him, a darker form. A vulture? Can he have already smelled what’s happened here?
If I go over the cliff, he will find me too, eventually. That’s the way it works.
Suddenly, the reptilian section of my brain kicks into gear, and I realize with a jolt that I can feel my blood pulsing through my veins, infusing every inch of my body with life. My body is still working, still doing its job, even as my thoughts turn to death. I guess no matter what kind of person I might be, no matter what I’ve done up to this point, I am a person who wants to live.
I want to live.
And then I go—scrambling down the side of the mountain, stumbling over roots and rocks, barely managing to keep myself upright. I press the iPad against my chest, gasping in the thin, cold air, but I keep going. There’s no trail here, but right now getting lost is better than being found.
I will not die for anyone—not for Chantal, not even for the girl I was.
I am running. Again.
If that makes me a monster, so be it.
Chapter One
Saturday, Oc
tober 13
Six Days Before
My fiancé, Heath Beck, sat all the way at the back of the crowded bar. I could see his reflection in the mirror behind the liquor bottles. Dark hair hiding his eyes. Shoulders hunched over the glossy oak slab, tipping a glass of brown liquid into his mouth. Seeing him like this felt artificial, like a scene out of a movie. This was the last place Heath would come—this bar on East Howard—hence the last place I thought to try. And yet here he was.
My know-it-all brain helpfully told me why.
He’s hiding from you.
I stood just inside the door, my legs gone wobbly beneath me. From dinnertime to just past midnight, I’d been driving around the city, checking out his favorite haunts, fueled by surging adrenaline. Now that I’d found him, the chemical was receding, leaving my limbs trembling and weak.
The bar was called Divine. Major branding irony, as the place was a discordant hell of shouted conversation, clinking glasses, and migraine-inducing techno-pop. The clientele—youngish, hollow-eyed metro-Atlanta professionals—milled around, sizing each other up for future business deals or a late-Saturday-night hit-and-run.
Heath hated this place. At least, that’s what he’d always said.
I pressed back against the wall and eyed him. Like always, twin bolts of disbelief and desire shot through me. Desire for his jaw-dropping handsomeness. Disbelief that he was truly mine. It always hurt, just a little bit, to look at Heath. There was a woman on the stool next to him. Young, with dreadlocked hair gathered into a tangled bun. She was wearing a transparent peasant blouse with no bra, but Heath didn’t seem to be the least bit aware of her. No surprise there. He wasn’t a cheater, not even a flirt. He’d never given me a reason to worry, not in that respect.
Dreadlocks grabbed her purse, slid off the stool, and walked toward the bathroom at the back of the bar, giving me my opening. I wanted to rush up to him, hug him, and smother him with kisses, but resisted the urge. This wasn’t a happy reunion; it was a confrontation. I needed to know what the hell was going on.
The nightmares had started a couple of months ago. They’d wrecked the bliss of our engagement, exhausted us and made us tiptoe around each other. And then came that first night when Heath didn’t return home from work. It hurt, of course. But more than that, it scared me. What did he need that I couldn’t give him? What was he doing that he couldn’t share? As it turned out, it was the first night of many. A new normal for us.
I could hear Lenny now, drawling in her posh, old-money Buckhead accent. This is why you give a man at least five years before you let him put a ring on it. She was my best friend, my partner in our corporate design business, and she was always looking out for my interests, but when it came to Heath, I took her advice with a whole saltshaker. She didn’t have the full story. She assumed I’d fallen fast and hard for Heath because he looked like he’d taken a wrong turn out of a Greek myth. She had no clue, but it wasn’t her fault. It was because I’d never told her. I’d never uttered the two words that would’ve explained everything: soul mate.
I couldn’t have said those words and expected her to keep a straight face. Nobody said old-fashioned stuff like that anymore. It made people gag and roll their eyes and pity your naïveté. The idea of a soul mate was a cliché. An invitation for mockery—even if it happened to be true. Even if it was the only term that came close to describing the connection you felt.
Somehow Heath and I had short-circuited the customary “Show me yours, I’ll show you mine” dating process and arrived at a perfect understanding of each other. “I have a story,” he’d said on our second date at a cramped Italian restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of the Westside. “A long, sad story that I don’t particularly enjoy talking about.”
I nodded. You and me both.
He sighed. Took my hand. “It stars a single mom, some of her particularly unfriendly boyfriends. She passes away. There are a lot of nights sleeping on friends’ couches.” He looked down at our interwoven fingers. “The thing is, I don’t believe therapy is the answer. I don’t believe you find strength in talking about your past. I think you find it in a person. The right person.”
I was mesmerized by the elusive logic of it all. Crazy how, in one instant, everything you could never express can suddenly make perfect sense. I wondered if I was the right person, if he was mine. And then he jutted his chin at the speaker above us, which had been playing a steady stream of Sinatra all evening. Now “Why Can’t You Behave?” slithered through the patio.
“This guy,” he said. “He’s always made my skin crawl.”
I laughed. I hated Sinatra too.
With that, loving another person became the most effortless, beautiful thing I’d ever experienced. Our silences were more precious to me than all the conversations I’d ever had with other men. Even after nine months together and getting engaged, Heath knew very little about me. But he knew the things that mattered. He knew I loved him. That I would never leave him. Not even with the nightmares, or the distance, or this ghosting routine he was putting me through. Not ever. Maybe it sounded desperate, but I had been searching my whole life for something I didn’t know existed. Now that I had it, now that I had him, there was no way in hell I was going to let it go.
Dread, like warm bile, pushed up my throat as I threaded through the crushing tide of people in Divine. I slid onto the vinyl stool the dreadlocked woman had deserted, and Heath straightened, a look of surprise on his face.
“Daphne.” He’d been playing with a white business card, rotating it between his fingers, but now he held it still, poised like a flag.
I fought the urge to put my hand against his cheek. “Hi.”
On the other side of Heath, a knot of girls in tight club dresses and impossible shoes not-so-subtly checked him out. I wondered how long they’d been standing there. Posing. Baiting him.
One, in particular, was really locked in. She had long honey-colored, flat-ironed hair, beige lipstick, and bright-blue eyelash extensions. College student, probably. A baby. I almost wished I could pull her aside:
Stay one night with him, I dare you. See how it feels to wake up to him screaming and ripping the sheets off the bed. Trying to climb through the window. Breaking the wedding dishes you picked out together at Crate and Barrel. See how sexy that shit is.
I hung my purse on the hook by my knees, caught her eye, then pushed up my glasses with my middle finger. Not super classy, but you know what they say—you can take the girl out of the Division of Family and Child Services . . .
Blue Eyelashes tossed her stick-straight tresses and turned back to her posse. She said something that made them all titter, then they aimed a collective sneer at me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the bartender chuckling to himself.
“I’m sorry I made you come looking for me,” Heath said.
I met his eyes. “Please don’t apologize. Not if you don’t mean it. Not if you’re just going to keep doing this every night.”
He started to say something but stopped, and in the sudden flash of light from the TV screens above the bar, I realized his eyes were red and damp.
“Not here,” I said quickly. “We can talk at home.”
“No. I can’t go home, not yet. I’m just . . .” He shook his head. “I need to tell you what’s going on. You’ve been really patient, and you deserve an explanation.”
I exhaled evenly. This was going to get tricky, I could feel it. Yes, I wanted Heath home, and yes, I wanted the nightmares to stop, and yes, maybe even an explanation from him would be just the thing to get us over this rough patch. But talking led to other, unwelcome things. Talking led to openness. To heartfelt statements, honesty, and confessions. Dangerous and unknown places. Places that terrified me.
Talking, for me, wasn’t an option.
Heath rubbed his eyes, and in the seconds he wasn’t looking, I picked four cashews out of a nearby bowl. I clenched them in my hand under the bar, feeling their reassuring kidney shape against my skin. Im
mediately the electrical storm in my head cleared, and I felt calmer.
I drew in a breath and let it out slowly. The counting was residue from my ranch years. A weird habit—or tic, whatever—that so far I’d been able to keep from Heath. Back then, it was always about food—how much was available and would I have access to it when I needed it. Now the counting alone seemed to settle my nerves. It always had to be an even number, preferably four. Four cashews, four stones, four pens. I knew it wasn’t normal—and sometimes I could curtail it with a quick snap of the elastic hair band I kept around my wrist, hidden among a stack of bracelets—but it did make me feel better. Particularly in moments of high stress. Like this one.
“Do you remember what you told me when we first met?” he asked. “About closure?”
I swallowed. Of course I remembered. It was the same thing I had said to every new friend I made, every guy who’d ever pressed me to talk about my past.
“You said closure was an illusion,” he went on. “You said we can’t go back. We can’t fix things. And trying only brings more pain.”
I waited. There was a but coming.
“I so admired you for believing that. For living it out every day. I wanted to be like you. I tried and tried, Daphne, but I’m not as strong as you. I want closure. I need it . . . and I need help finding it.”
He pushed the business card he’d been holding at me. I stared at it numbly.
Dr. Matthew Cerny, PhD, the elegant font read. Baskens Institute. Dunfree, Georgia.
“He’s a therapist. A psychologist,” Heath said.
A therapist. Someone whose sole job it was to make you tell your secrets. To poke and prod at you until you voluntarily gave up information that ruined your life—or someone else’s. I had opened up to a psychologist once, and it had torn a good man’s world apart. Torn mine apart too. The dread I’d been swallowing since I set foot in this place snaked up into my chest and lodged there.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“You said you didn’t believe in therapy.” My voice was faint.
“I didn’t, but maybe I’ve been wrong. Too stubborn to admit it’s the one thing I need.”
Every Single Secret Page 1